There is the most amazingly bass ackwards discussion going on over at Pandagon on pornography, masculinity, and what's wrong with men. I'm still not quite up to snuff as far as constructing lucid arguments (as witness the growing pile of book reviews waiting to be written), but I'll try to hit at least some of the high (low?) points. The biggest problem is that there are a lot of people arguing from fairly obvious agendas here, and I'm not sure they're even aware of it.
To start, there's a couple of missing elements (and this is based on a first reading of Marcotte's post, without any real study of the materials she's referencing). Let's just point out that pornography is about fantasy of a particular kind. Since it deals with sex in a no-holds-barred context -- i.e., minus all the social constraints -- and since sex is a basic matrix for a lot of psychological shit, given the way we deal with it -- or refuse to -- in this society, it's only to be expected that these fantasies are going to include elements of power, control, cruelty, superiority, emotional distance, and a lot of other things that we're not allowed to express otherwise.
Yeah, I readily admit that heterosexual porn is pretty much foreign territory for me -- not interested. However, gay porn, although it sidesteps the misogynist issue completely, does contain a lot of the same fantasy elements -- and also allows the audience to play either role, which is not something that Marcotte and her commenters seems to touch on at all vis-a-vis straight porn. In fact, the arguments are so heavily weighted against the construct of masculinity -- and there seesm to be a strong bias against any construction of masculinity -- that there doesn't seem to be any admission of the possibility.
It's the construct of masculinity that is they core of Marcotte's post:
When he talks about eradicating “masculinity”, he’s talking about eradicating the social construct of masculinity, especially as it’s defined in America. Think about how masculinity is constructed in America: violent, hateful, out of touch with “softer” emotions like love, irresponsible, stupid, willfully ignorant, and of course with a sexuality based around violence and conquest, not around pleasure and the sharing of it. (Today’s example—how anal sex is only “fun” if it’s a coercive process—is just one of many to add to the mind-numbing amounts of misogynist porn out there.)
Her description of how masculinity is contructed in America is grossly one-sided -- I'm not sure if it's her definition or if she's paraphrasing Jensen, but the result in either case goes way beyond the bounds of credibility. Commenter Steve points out some of the flaws:
These are parts of the construct of masculinity, but it also includes things like self reliance, self-sacrifice, and innovation. Certainly one can argue that these qualities are expressed in anti-social ways when combined the other, or that these qualities are not emphasized in culture as whole enough. However, the notion that masculinity — as a cultural construct — is responsible for violent porn seems a bit of an over-reach, as violent porn has continued to exist across multiple cultures for several thousand years. The nature and extent of violent porn tends to ebb and flow with upheavals in societies - often as a reaction to particular moral movements. For instance, one can see the increase in child and rape oriented porn as the Victorian era reached its peak. These images wained, though did not disappear completely, after WWI. Porn tends to be a hyper-reaction to social fores - at least that’s my opinion.
He's absolutely correct in fleshing out the definition of "masculinity," and his picture is much more balanced than that provided by Marcotte. (He's also pretty much on point in his comments about "fashions" in porn. It's an almost one-for-one correspondence with fashions in body imagery related to periods of social repression, particularly in the preponderance/scarcity of open renderings of the male nude.) The response to his comments by SarahMC are indicative to me to the degree to which the agenda permeates the discussion:
But Steve, self reliance, self-sacrifice, and innovation are not qualities exhibited only by men. And it’s because of that that the concept of “masculinity” is harmful; it’s essentialism. While both “femininity” and “masculinity” include positive characteristics, the binary model means that those characteristics are assigned to either men or women, not both. Both men and women are capable of self-sacrifice (”masculine”) and sensitivity (”feminine”).
I.e., the positive qualities of masculinity are universal, with the implication being that the negative qualities are not? It's instructive that she starts with some amelioration of this black/white dichotomy, and then immediately drops it in favor of broad generalities about the "harmfulness" of the concept of masculinity -- and again, does this mean that the definitions of "femininity" are not harmful? And why isn't that addressed, if not solely to preserve the moral high ground?
And, in case there was any doubt about the agenda here, Marcotte's own comment (#51) lays that misapprehension to rest: pure, textbook "men are the oppressors and are big babies to boot" feminist cant.
It's really a shame. There is the potential in these questions for an interesting examination of how something like pornography reflects social stresses and the role of sexual fantasies in defusing otherwise touchy social conflicts, not to mention the social construction of gender and sex roles, but it seems all to have gotten lost in the sloganeering.
(The irony here is that Marcotte uses an image from Homobilila.com, a site devoted to vintage homoerotic images, to head her post. So how seriously should I take this whole thing?)
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